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Catch Me If You Can Review by Adrian Hyland There is a sequence in Steven Spielberg's new "Catch Me If You Can" that perfectly illustrates what has gone wrong with his filmmaking in recent years. Frank Abagnale (Leonardo Di Caprio), on the run from FBI man Tom Hanks, is holed up in the upstairs bedroom of a Southern mansion as a party takes place downstairs. Hanks arrives at the party, learns of Abagnale's whereabouts and proceeds upstairs, where he pauses for a minute at the closed door of the bedroom. On the floor beneath the door there is a single banknote, and as he watches it suddenly floats up into the air, caught by a gust of wind. In that moment we realise that Abagnale has escaped through the window. It's an inspired piece of cinematic storytelling, or at least it would be if Spielberg didn't then feel the need to follow Hanks inside the room, where we learn, sure enough, what we already knew: that Abagnale has indeed escaped through the window. It's as if Spielberg didn't trust his instincts, and what could have been a brilliant, almost sub-conscious Hitchcockian 'bit of business' simply draws attention to itself. It's commercial filmmaking minus the entertainment, and moments such as this punctuate the film with deadening regularity; "Catch Me If You Can" is a two hour twenty minute entertainment-free zone. Recent years have seen Spielberg's work take on a mimetic quality, as though he were searching for a deeper cinematic language through experimenting with the styles of other directors. He achieved something remarkable with the truly spooky first segment of "A.I." (spooky in that it felt like it was directed by Stanley Kubrick, who died during pre-production), but then the film spontaneously combusted in a hail of "Mad Max" and Ridley Scott references before the inevitable arrival of aliens 10 minutes from the end. At least "A.I." was interesting; last year's "Minority Report" had the shallowness of a Tony Scott film, and had it not been a Tom Cruise vehicle it would probably have tanked at the box office. It's been a long, long time since Spielberg made a movie that was any fun. "Catch Me If You Can" is based on the true story of teenage con artist Frank Abagnale, who in the late '60s swindled his way to a small fortune courtesy of cheque fraud, at the same time using his tricky charms to persuade in a succession of high-paying, high status jobs. He was at various stages employed as an airline pilot, a doctor and a lawyer, and has been described as the world's most successful conman. With this material surely the film of his exploits would be a highwire illusory thrill-ride, but Spielberg shows little interest in what makes Abagnale's story special (his virtuoso acts of deception); this director is more interested in Frank's relationship with his Dad. Spielberg seems to have lost that playful streak that made his early work so enjoyable, and so the film never delivers what we are looking forward to most: the cerebral kick of watching a conman at work. It seemingly hasn't occurred to the director to draw the audience into one of the scams, in the way that David Mamet's "House of Games" or Stephen Frears' "The Grifters" did, which is a shame, because the reality/illusion puzzle is part of what makes movies about conmen such a turn on. This film reminded me more of Ron Howard's "A Beautiful Mind", another 'true story' in which the director neatly skipped around the protagonist's defining characteristics, in John Nash's case his mathematical genius and his mental illness, choosing instead the well-trodden path that is the Hollywood love story. You could feel Howard's compassion in that movie though, and he seems to be a much better director of actors than Spielberg, whose new trademark seems to be the clinical detachment epitomised by the cinematography of Janusz Kaminski, with its endlessly distracting photographic effects and cool veneer. This chilly atmosphere is no place for Leonardo Di Caprio, the most transparent and emotionally explosive of actors. Di Caprio has the rare gift of being uninhibited; he goes so far in his articulation of joy and pain that the effect, in films like "A Boy's Life" and "The Basketball Diaries", is overwhelmingly powerful, and sometimes it feels as though he goes to those places so we don't have to, which gives his acting that heroic quality that Brando's had. In "Catch Me If You Can" Di Caprio is chronically miscast, straightjacketed in the role of a man whose modus operandi is to conceal his emotions at all times. He doesn't exactly look uncomfortable, but it's no fun to watch him 'putting on the charm'; you feel he'd be a lot more irresistable if he cut loose the way he does in his other movies. Why Spielberg chose not to utilise the unpredictability and volatility of his leading man is a mystery. Perhaps a carefree Di Caprio wouldn't have fit into the director's conception of the movie as a rather confusing warning to parents everywhere: Don't get divorced, in case your children go out, become conmen, make millions of dollars illegally before getting caught, then make millions more legally courtesy of the people that caught them. When Abagnale opens his suitcase to reveal the hundreds of thousands of dollars he has accumulated, his face says 'what have I done to deserve this?', and Spielberg seems to want us to feel sorry for him. Abagnale is presented as a man whose rollercoaster ride of wealth and luxury springs not from reserves of nerveless ingenuity, but from the fear and confusion caused by the failings of his parents. And he finds his redemption in the arms of the FBI man who eventually catches him. If that's really the 'true story', then no wonder the movie is such a downer. — Adrian Hyland studied post-production at South Seas Film & Television School. He now works as a news editor at TV3. |